General Electric - Building Something Big

February 05, 2012 |
:45

One of a pair of Super Bowl ads for General Electric in 2014, BBDO New York's “Building Something Big” takes place inside an appliance plant instead of the turbine factory of “Power and Beer.” The pitch is U.S. manufacturing jobs (a theme WeatherTech would take up in 2014 with “You Can’t Do That”): “We’re on the forefront of revitalizing manufacturing,” one worker says. “We’re proving that it can be done here and it can be done well.”

GE planted the seeds of the broader campaign in 2011, when it ran commercials showing GE employees learning how the company's medical equipment helped diagnose cancer in a patient and workers from the company's aircraft unit seeing a General Electric engine placed into a plane. GE burnished its Super Bowl ads with plenty of digital media, including an opportunity for viewers to tell GE what they think is working in their own communities and perhaps deflect some of the "current negativity" brought on by a weak economy, as a spokeswoman told Ad Age at the time.